480 - American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War, 1860-1869

American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War, 1860-1869
James H. Moorhead
New Haven, Yale University Press, 1978. 278 pp. $17.50.

This book, which in its original form as a Yale doctoral dissertation won the Brewer Prize of the American Society of Church History, is a fascinating analysis of northern Protestant attitudes toward the Civil War, and it makes particular use of published sermons and essays during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Moorhead, who teaches religion at North Carolina State University, delineates the millennialism which pervaded nineteenth-century Protestantism, and in the North, the sense of God's coming Kingdom in America was linked increasingly to the preservation of the Union and the abolition

481 - American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War, 1860-1869

of slavery. The War Between the States became the Civil War for these Northerners, convinced that God's purposes would not prevail without victory over the South and the maintenance of the American Republic God's New Israel.

The War was a Holy War, a Crusade, for both North and South, testing whether God's design for America would be realized, and few Protestants on either side grasped the brooding insight of Lincoln that perhaps the Almighty had purposes which were not fully served by the outcome of the war. In a brief but perceptive epilogue, Moorhead shows how the Northern victory contributed to the complacency of Gilded Age Protestantism; having won, Northerners were confirmed in their understanding of God's intervention in history. Southerners in turn took their religion and withdrew from the world, knowing that history "had happened" to them, as Toynbee once observed. Only later would Northerners encounter the same experience.

John M. Mulder
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, N.J.